Introduction

Visitors coming into the entrance hall of the Kunsthaus Bregenz this summer will face a large screen. A sequence of images fades into the soft ambient light of Peter Zumthor’s famous building. The video work The Quiet Shore, 2011, seems as if it were made for this place. It is a work by David Claerbout, one of the most renowned and significant contemporary artists. This year’s summer exhibition at the Kunsthaus Bregenz focuses on his video and sound works.

In Travel, 1996–2013, presented on the first floor, the viewer is taken on a visual tour through a forst inspired by relaxation music. The dispassionate yet cinematic character of the synthesizer, suggestive of “generic” images that anyone could imagine, of places in a dark and tranquil forest, prompted the decision not to film, but to use advanced computer-generated images. This choice reflects the search for a space that is beyond the specific, that wants to be generic like the music.

Radio Piece (Hong Kong), 2015, is an audio-visual installation on the second floor that deals with the intersection of mental and physical space, set in the “walled city,” a vertical slum in the Kowloon district of Hong Kong. Radio Piece casts doubt on the coherence of perception, while formulating a critique of the colonization of the mind as real estate.

Claerbout’s newest video Olympia (The Real-Time Disintegration into Ruins of the Berlin Olympic Stadium over the Course of a Thousand Years), 2016—3016, on the top floor of the KUB is a digital reconstruction of the Olympic Stadium in Berlin, which was built by the Nazis and opened for the 1936 Summer Olympics with great pomp. David Claerbout scanned each stone to create a deceptively real 3D version. The camera leads up to the empty building and through its monumental halls. Its representation in real time has been calculated to last for a thousand years. Stones erode and plants sprout. Even the current weather conditions are simulated using data from a webcam: if the sky over Berlin is cloudless, so it is in the projection.

In the evening, when the exhibition closes, the facade of the KUB comes to life with an outdoor projection of Claerbout’s Die reine Notwendigkeit/The Pure Necessity (2016). The video is based on the classic 1967 film The Jungle Book. In Claerbout’s film, Baloo, Bagheera, and Kaa do not sing, talk, and dance; Claerbout shows a bear, a panther, and a snake as they behave in nature. They are no longer anthropomorphized. Unlike his other films, these shots were not digitally rendered. Instead, each frame was drawn by hand in the style of the original animated film.

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